SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
24 year old hits $30k MRR in 6 months with unique SaaS cold email scripts
27 Sep 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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Guys, getserall.com is what companies use to quickly find a list of influencers to promote their brand. Yash built this. They're doing $34,000 per month in revenue. He's a sole founder, owns 100%, got his first customer back in December of 2022 using Apollo to build an email list, LinkedIn Sales Navigator to focus on influencer marketing managers at e-commerce brands.
and ultimately reached out with Loom videos, Figma screenshots, et cetera, to get 15 minutes on their calendar to land his first five pre-sold paying customers. Again, scaling nicely, profiting $10,000 per month with his team of six as he looks to scale. Hey folks, my guest today is Yash Chavan.
He's a marketer at heart who dropped out of engineering college to work in sales and eventually fell in love with growing companies, SaaS companies, at his agency. Today he's working on a company called GetSaral.com. It's an influencer marketing platform for e-commerce brands. Yash, you ready to take us to the top? Yes, Nathan. Two years ago, I read your book. I wish you life being on the show.
So here I am. That's awesome. We're thrilled to have you. So why did you choose influencer marketing for e-commerce brands in terms of your first SaaS company? This is a tough space. Influencers come and go. Churn is tricky. It's sort of a marketplace problem as well. Yeah. So we're not building a marketplace.
We're building a search engine, which is fundamentally different from most other influencer platforms on the market. And the reason why I started this was because we were doing influencer marketing for some brands.
And we found that the whole process of... If an e-commerce brand wants to work with an influencer, they've got to find them, they've got to contact them, they've got to send them a contract, they've got to figure out a way to track when they post, affiliate link, shipping products, all of that is very...
I'm clunky and expensive if you use a software or a bunch of software to do it or extremely time consuming if you do it manually. So Serral basically like simplifies this process and brings it under one roof. So I see.
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Chapter 2: How did Yash achieve $30k MRR in just 6 months?
I see. I see. Okay. So what is the average company pay you per month to use your influencer search engine? $299 a month. $299? Yes. That's great. How did you come up with that price point? So we started at, so story, when I started again, so Dean Maxwell is one of my mentors.
So I pre-sold the software to five people at 99 bucks before I wrote the first line of code, before we wrote the first line of code. So I was like, okay, 99 is the base price. And my offer was, you will get two months of the software if you pay me for one month. So we just like split board 99, to be honest. And then slowly we started increasing it. So when we launched, we made it
We launched at 99. In a couple of months, we made it 150. A couple of months, we made it 199. Then we increased it to 299. In fact, we saw higher quality customers come in, the higher our price point went. So that's why we settled on 299. That's great. Yash, when did you land that first paying customer? What month? That was in December of last year. December 2022.
Chapter 3: What unique strategies did Yash use to land his first customers?
That's great. And then fast forward to today, how many customers total? 103. That's amazing. Okay, so 103 customers paying $299 a month. Is that right? Correct. Congrats. Okay. That's 30,000 bucks of monthly recurring revenue, right? Actually 34, because there are some bigger brands that use us who are doing, they want like, they want to reach out to 2000 influencers a month.
So they are on a slightly higher package. Like I said, the expansion. So it's 34, but yeah. That makes tons of sense. Walk us through how you, you know, a lot of founders struggle that, you know, they spend a year writing code and they realize nobody wants to buy their software. Where did you find those first five customers you pre-sold?
Yeah, it was pretty just like doing things that don't scale, reaching out on LinkedIn to people who were doing influencer marketing and saying, hey, I'm looking to build a software. And I just said, hey, do you have pain? I'm building software that solves this for persona. Would you mind hopping on a 15-minute call to review it?
Or I used to send them a Loom video of like Figma mock-ups saying, hey, like, what do you think? Would this be useful? And people shared feedback with me. And then we actually refined the product in the Figma MVP stage before we even like hired a programmer or whatever. So, yeah.
Chapter 4: Why did Yash choose influencer marketing for e-commerce brands?
That's very cool. Okay. How did you, what did you search on LinkedIn to find the persons to send the cold messages to? Yeah. Yeah, influencer. So that's our core user, which is an influencer marketing manager at an e-commerce brand. So we just reach out to those people saying, and I sent thousands of cold emails as well. So it's like, I sent cold emails saying, hey, we're launching the software.
I'm not looking to sell you anything. I just need feedback. Would you be open? And people were surprisingly open to it. So yeah. Sticking with LinkedIn, and then we'll go to your cold email strategy for a second. So what button are you pushing on LinkedIn to find only e-commerce companies?
And then what button are you pushing after you get that company list to find only the influencer marketing manager at the company? Yeah, in Sales Navigator, there's a filter, I think it's the retail filter or something you can use to find e-commerce brands and you can type in the keyword e-commerce. You can look at hashtags on LinkedIn as well.
So if someone's posting about hashtag influencer marketing, very likely they're in the influencer marketing space or hashtag e-commerce marketing, see who's posting. Those are content creators, which means they're also engaged because LinkedIn has a lot of leads, but they're not on LinkedIn. Like they don't log in once a month.
So it's pretty useless reaching out to those people to reach out to people who are actually actively posting, commenting, things like that. So, yeah. Did you give any, you know, I understand reaching out saying you have a new product. Are you open to help on a 15 minute call? Here's a loom video as a tease. Did you give them any incentive for their time? I mean, time is valuable.
Did you say take the call and I'll give you a free year or something? I didn't say free year. I did add a line. I think I heard Jason Cohen say this. I said something like, I'm happy to pay you for your time if you're open to just chatting. But nobody took my money. They gave me money. So yeah. Okay. No one. That's very cool. All right.
So and then now let's pivot over to cold emails for a second. So first off, what tool did you use to send them? Was it a reply.io, SendGrid, something else?
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Chapter 5: How does GetSaral simplify influencer marketing for brands?
It was instantly. Okay, instantly. Yeah, they're crushing it, I hear. So instantly is what you use. Were you happy with them? Yeah, pretty good. It's a good tool. Okay. How did you get the cold email list to put into instantly? I think it was Apollo. I think one of those sources, Apollo Sales Nav, I had subscriptions for these tools. So yeah. What does Sales Navigator cost you?
I think it's like 50 bucks or something. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Cool. And then, okay, got it. So what did you search? And we already know sales navigator, how I used it. What did you search in Apollo to build a cold email list? Same thing. So I actually targeted different personas.
I went after founders of e-com brands saying, Hey, it's influencer marketing, even something you're looking at doing. Why haven't you done it yet? Because everyone was, if I just gave you a hundred influencers, you were like, It's like, hey, e-commerce brand, here's 100 influencers who are ready to promote you. Everyone's going to say yes to that. So what's the friction?
Like, why aren't you doing it? So I figured that out speaking with founders and then obviously speaking to influencer marketing managers or just marketing people in e-com in general, asking them what their pains were while they were doing influencer marketing. So they shared This main feedback was around two bits. There were people who were using some enterprise.
Chapter 6: What pricing strategy did Yash implement for his SaaS product?
So our space is very like, I think it's typical of the SaaS space where it's kind of like a mature industry where there's some companies that were started in 2013, 2015 built for that market. And they're priced at like $20,000, $30,000 a year paid upfront annually. And newer modern brands don't want to do that. Like I don't want to pay 30K without even a free trial.
So I wanted to build something that was a startup product. SMB-friendly equivalent. So we offer a free trial. We are transparent with our pricing. We don't force people to hop on three sales calls. So all these were pain points that I discovered. So the pain points are not just in terms of the product, but also in terms of... Excuse me. Bless you.
The pain points are not just in terms of the product, but also in terms of the business model, for example. So like, hey, I don't want to hop on three sales calls. Well, here's a free trial and so on. So like I discovered all of these things. Yeah. This makes tons of sense. Okay. When you launch the business, you're your sole founder. You have a co-founder. Solo founder. That's awesome.
So you still have 100% today? Correct. That's awesome. Any plans to raise or you want to bootstrap? I actually applied to TinySeed twice before they rejected me. So we were at like 800 MRR, they rejected, 3000 MRR, they rejected. Now at 32K, I applied like a couple of weeks back and now they're like, yeah, we're excited. So I'm speaking to Rob Walling tomorrow. Don't know how that's going to go.
But I think that it's going to be undervalued. So we're likely not going to go with them. But yeah, let's see. I very likely want to raise for some like hiring and growth purposes, but I don't want to go the VC route. We'll see like if I just hit 60, 70K MRR in a couple of months, then I can just bear the brunt and not raise. What do you think TinySeed will value the business at?
What's their typical offer? So they invest 120K to 250K for a 10 to 12%. And I assume given our revenue, they'll give us 250K for a 10%, which will be 2.5, yeah. So that's basically what I want to, that's a 5X multiple on your current ARR or something like that? Yeah. Yeah. Is it worth, so I mean, is that worth the dilution to you or how do you think about that?
No, I don't want to give up 10% for 250K because I just, I know my numbers will be at 50K by end of year. So at 50K, then I don't need the, I don't upfront need 250K anyway, right? It's not like 250K. Even if I get the 250, I'm probably going to spend it 10K at a time. So if I'm at 50K, I don't need the 250. So yeah. Unless someone's like a strategic investor or
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Chapter 7: When did Yash acquire his first paying customer?
Some of our brands are bigger brands, like eight, nine figure companies who are using Serral. Some of those founders are interested in me and the tool in general. So they're like, hey, if you're ever raising, I'll write an angel check. So if I ever need money, I can just raise from my customers. Have you identified any other capital sources besides TinySeed and besides traditional VC? No.
No, I haven't really looked at the VC model or raising money. I just focused on the product. But right now, we're having some friction in the model. I think I need more people to do some support, onboarding, that sort of stuff for which I need more money. So yeah, right now, I'm just getting into that world.
How much money would you need over the next three months to make these one or two hires that you mentioned? Probably like, I don't know, not much, maybe for three months, probably like 30K, 50K around that.
So I guess if someone looked at your current 103 paid customers, right, that pay you $299 a month, and they expect those customers to keep paying $299 per month based off your historical churn values, and they offered to basically pull that cash forward for you and give you 30K today, is that the kind of structure you'd look at? Yeah, I'd consider it. I see what you're doing, Nathan.
You're good at this. Just curious, just curious. Real recognize real. Yeah, yeah, just curious. I'll consider it. No, I'll genuinely consider it. Yeah, I spent years thinking about what is the right product structure for founders, like with your mindset, right? You want to keep equity, and that's why we launched FounderPath. Okay, very cool. Well, congrats on the growth.
Talk to me more about the full team size today. How many full-time? Six people. Six people. Okay. And profitable or are you burning? Profitable. Can I ask how much? Um, make it roughly about 10 K. It depends. Cause I reinvest a little bit in like every dollar I make, I reinvest in marketing.
So we have profitable at 20 K for example, but then every, every like 5k increment we have, I'm reinvesting in, um, people I'm reinvesting in marketing. So we're intentionally low profitable, but like we are making 5k, 8k profit, sometimes 10 K depending on the month. So yeah. I love that. This is a great story. Let's wrap up here.
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Chapter 8: What challenges did Yash face in building his cold email list?
Yash with the famous five, number one, favorite business book. Her business book, $100 million offers. Yeah. Hermosi, that's a good one. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? I'm going to name three, the three Bs of bootstrapping, Becker, Brunson, and Berry. Who's the last one, actually? Nathan Berry. Oh, Berry, Nathan Berry. Yeah.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the company? um, close IO CRM. Yep. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Six, six hours. Situation, married, single kids, single, no kids running around yet. All right. How old are you? I am 24, 24. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. I guess I was very impatient. I guess I still am.
I want things to be done now, now, now. But then I guess if I were to give myself some, I was like, just be patient, keep showing up, and things will happen. So, yeah. Guys, GetSurall.com is what companies use to quickly find a list of influencers. promote their brand. Yash built this. They're doing $34,000 per month in revenue.
He's a sole founder, owns 100%, got his first customer back in December of 2022 using Apollo to build an email list, LinkedIn Sales Navigator to focus on influencer marketing managers at e-commerce brands, and ultimately reached out with Loom videos, Figma screenshots, et cetera, to get 15 minutes on their calendar to land his first five pre-sold paying customers.
Again, scaling nicely, profiting $10,000 per month with his team of six as he looks to scale. Yash, thanks for taking us to the top. Right. This is great. Thanks, Nathan.
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